Dennis Maliq Barnes is a 16 year old high school student in New Orleans, LA. And he may be a world record holder. Even if he isn’t, Dennis certainly seems to be blessed. Dennis has a total of 9 million dollars offered to him in college scholarship money. The 16 year old has a 4.98 GPA, 27 college credits that he has taken in high school, and impressively – 130 scholarship offers from colleges and universities throughout the country that total more than 9 million dollars if you add them all up. While the 9 million dollars aren’t transferable between the different universities, you could certainly say that Dennis probably has his college funding covered.
When God visited Abram in Genesis 12, He told Abram “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;”
It’s a funny thing when you think about it. God is telling Abram that it will actually be a good thing for the people that want to bless him. God promises to bless them back if they bless him. In some ways, that means that Abram will be doing people a favor by allowing them to bless him. Likewise, he should try to keep them from cursing him, because if they curse him, God will curse them.
By extension, since we are Abraham’s children through the work of Jesus, God promises the same to us. He will bless those who bless us and those who curse us, He will curse. That not only means that we should be ready to bless people around us, but also that we should be humbly willing to accept the blessings that others bless us with – because they will be blessed moreover by God because of the blessing they give us.
This flies in the face of the performance mentality that we live with most of the time. We think that we should shy away from “blessings” because we didn’t really “earn” them. But God’s Kingdom doesn’t work because we earned something, it works because He gave us something as a free gift – the ultimate blessing, our salvation.
This week, remember that God will bless those who bless you. So let them bless you. Be thankful for that. It will teach you the economy of God’s Kingdom which is had by blessing and not by earning.